


build god, then we'll talk

by serenaii



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Angst, M/M, also known as 'is mayuzumi screwed or is he screwed', asking the important questions since 2014, plotless angsty mayuaka that's it that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-26
Updated: 2014-02-26
Packaged: 2018-01-13 20:27:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1239715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenaii/pseuds/serenaii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are times when he feels like he doesn't exist (and there are times when he knows).</p>
<p></p><blockquote>
  <p>He remembers it now because it isn’t supposed to be his story. He isn’t supposed to grab onto crimson red hair and feel his fingers slip right through. He isn’t supposed to bite down hard on tongues and wonder about the absence of blood. He isn’t supposed to dribble a basketball, taste its curve like vertebrae and its strength like tense muscle, and then suddenly taste nothing at all.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	build god, then we'll talk

**Author's Note:**

> originally written for bps's otp battle, now with an added 200+ words of utter nonsense  
> i kind of wrote this while simultaneously trying to do my chinese homework; the sanity of the fic is as follows...

There are times when he feels like he doesn’t exist.

That’s a strange sentence—there’s a better way to phrase it, surely. To clarify, it isn’t his existence that hangs on a thread of uncertainty, no; he exists, heart and mind and soul cobbled together in eighteen years of stewing adolescent angst, talk-backs and sarcasm and flighty independence bubbling over the lid of his mouth just to prove that yes, Mayuzumi Chihiro exists, not as some non-corporeal being but as a living breathing person and isn’t that swell.

But sometimes it feels like there is nothing holding the sploshing liquid together, and when this feeling overwhelms him, the colourless packaging of skin that hides his heart and mind and soul falls short and fails, flickers in and out of—he refuses to use the word—transience, planes of being, basketball and giving up and red yellow red.

There was a story he read once, back before his light novel phase, about a god who crafted illusions out of rocks and moulded dreams out of pebbles. Every night, the god would carry these tiny falsehoods in a leather bag all the way to the riverside; he would skip those stones across the water in the moonlight, watch them sink down to the bottom, down to a world he could not reach. And every night, he would peer into the river to watch the humans on the other side, their bodies bruised and battered as stones rained down, as gravel sunk into their skin and dotted their pockmarked hearts. It was funny, the first two thousand years, watching them as they bled out of holes they could not feel.  But the humans grew smarter, they always did, and then they started digging into their flesh to find these wounds, digging and digging and digging until their fingers cracked, digging until even the gods could laugh no longer—and here there were no more pages left to turn, for there was no more story left to tell.

He remembers it now because it isn’t supposed to be his story. He isn’t supposed to grab onto crimson red hair and feel his fingers slip right through. He isn’t supposed to bite down hard on tongues and wonder about the absence of blood. He isn’t supposed to dribble a basketball, taste its curve like vertebrae and its strength like tense muscle, and then suddenly taste nothing at all.

So in the dead of the night, with the door locked and the curtains drawn and the starlight shining through the cracks in his conscience, he seals his eyes shut and thinks of the ways it’s supposed to be. Fingers and lips and tongues become false-born memories, seeds implanted in ransacked ground by a conqueror who only knew to conquer. Costly decisions and foolish mistakes become work of illusions and gods and pebbles skipping across the surface of a reflected moon. Life becomes eighteen years of overcooked stew: the lid is sealed shut with nothing to show for its time, the meat is stringy and bland, and the stock contains no mind or soul that hasn’t been boiled away.

He figures Akashi eats at high-end establishments, all bubbly champagne and high tea and fine bone china. He has probably never heard of the concept of overcooked meat, probably thinks it’s some sort of strange and creative torture method, but he kisses Mayuzumi the same way one would consume a delicacy (and Mayuzumi is remarkably like unethically prepared goose liver, in many ways). Their teeth clink together, wine glasses and polished silver and delicate hands unfolding origami napkins. He cannot be certain that Akashi won’t swallow him whole, just like that, an elegant whirlwind of lips and tongues and hands running through colourless hair.

Akashi draws back, looks at him with mismatched eyes as bright as they are dull. It reminds Mayuzumi of a regal deer in headlights,  gaze slightly wider than average and mouth upturned just a little bit (there are two hundred and twenty one reasons why this is not normal and Akashi Seijuurou is every last one of them).

He can feel the rhythm of his heartbeat. It lingers uncomfortably, like shards of glass in his ears, as he debates the merits of touching Akashi’s face just to make sure they both—not that word again—were real, not particles-of-stolen-dreams real but flesh-blood-skin real.

He lifts one hand, reaches out, and slaps through air.

There is a short silence. Akashi (what he thinks is Akashi) lifts his fingers up, trails down a red path, and normally Mayuzumi would feel guilty. But illusions are tricky business if you are not a god, he has learnt, so he stands there defiant and waits for this one to disappear, to crumble into clay and be washed away by river water.

Except it is not night time—the sun shines it’s rays through glass panes and stop-gap dust particles—and this is not a dream, and he waits and waits for what seems like lifetimes but Akashi stands there, hand on his face, and why why why he cannot make sense of this it was never real before so why—

_The match will begin soon_ , Akashi says. His face is a reddening mistake but his back is straightened, and suddenly the captain’s back, a deer that has crushed the oncoming headlights and overturned the car. Even so, his blood gold eyes linger on Mayuzumi’s just a bit longer than it ever has. _I expect you to give it your all._

Akashi throws the final anchor as he shuts the door. Mayuzumi can feel the heaviness in his chest, dead-weight shifting in the sandy epithelial cells lining his organs, and maybe he _is_ going to cry, he’s sunk so far down into his own grave that it doesn’t really matter anymore. He feels his heart coil and the tears roll down his face but then he touches his cheek (what he thinks is his cheek) and the skin there is as dry as bone.

Soon, he will step out of the locker room and enter the court. There, he will be invisible, and the lighting will turn his hair an ugly pastel blue, but he will hold the ball with real solid fingers and he will win and Akashi will love him all the more for it. Until then, his hands will be steam ghosting through skin and bones and door handles. Until then, his eyes will leak liquid petroleum. Until then, this game will matter, and then he will hold that crown in his hands and kiss it back and it will not matter at all.

He exists. He can’t feel it, but he knows. It’s an existence melded from gold trophies and ruby eyes, but there is metal heart and jewel soul pressing cold against glass ribs and damn it all he feels _alive_ ; perhaps there is no moral to this ending, yet it’s an ending all the same, and maybe that’s everything he needs from this sorry, sorry  tale.

**Author's Note:**

> (is mayuzumi crazy? am i crazy? are you crazy? we will never know)


End file.
